Читать книгу A Maverick To (Re)Marry - Christine Rimmer - Страница 11

Chapter Three

Feeling light as air suddenly, and dangerously playful, Amy took his hat off the blanket and put it on. It was too big, and slipped down over her eyes.

Laughing, she tipped her head back. “Yeah. Lots of stars. A beautiful night.”

“You forgive me, for not calling?”

“Yeah.” She said it softly. “Thank you for the picnic. I...feel better about everything.”

He was watching her so steadily. “You’re as pretty as you ever were, Miss Wainwright—hell, you’re prettier.”

She felt the blush as it swept up her neck and over her cheeks. But what with the darkness, she doubted he could see it. She opened her mouth to say something teasing and light. But the memories were pressing in again and somehow, a raw truth slipped out. “I’ve had a crush on you since I was thirteen.”

It was an old confession, one she’d made to him long ago, at a party on New Year’s Eve, the night he told her for the first time that she was everything he’d ever wanted.

Her heart had ached with sheer happiness that night. How impossibly young she’d been, young and absolutely certain that nothing could ever tear them apart.

He reached up, took his hat off her head and set it on his chest. “You never would look at me. Not when you were thirteen or fourteen or fifteen...”

“I had no clue you might be looking at me. Not until that first tutoring session.”

He grunted. “You were seventeen. And you still wouldn’t look at me, even then.”

“So, shoot me. I was shy. But it didn’t take that long once we were stuck in a room together. By the end of that first session, I was looking at you, and right in the eye, too. I started getting the feeling then that just maybe you liked me—but then, I told myself, you liked all the girls.”

“Uh-uh.” His eyes shone almost black in the moonlight, holding hers. “I only wanted you.”

“You asked me out.” She couldn’t help grinning. “I turned you down.”

“But I persisted,” he said.

“Oh, yes, you did.” By Christmas of that year, she totally got that the hottest guy in school was crazy about her. Then at New Year’s, he’d said he wasn’t looking at any other girl. And he proved it, too. He was all about her, about Amy. And it felt so good to be wanted by a guy at last—not to mention by the sexiest, most charming guy in the whole school.

“My dad taught me that,” he said.

“Taught you what?”

“To persist. ‘Son,’ he used to say, ‘above all, if you want something, persist.’ He always said persist with emphasis, you know?”

Amy remembered Charles Dalton as a kind, intelligent man.

“I always liked your dad.” She brushed his shoulder, realized that touching him was maybe a bridge too far, and quickly withdrew her hand. “Um, your mom, too.”

He stared up at the sky for a string of too-quiet seconds before asking, “How are your parents?”

“They’re well. My dad retired two years ago. They moved to San Diego. They seem to like it there. My mom’s in a bunch of clubs—book clubs, bridge clubs. He plays a lot of golf.”

“Well, good,” Derek said. He was watching her again, his eyes so deep, she wanted to fall in and never come out.

There had been no love lost between Derek and her mom and dad. They’d checked and found out that he was not a great student and would likely never even go to college. Derek only wanted to live on his family’s ranch and work all day running cattle. He wasn’t what her parents had in mind for her, their precious only daughter.

Her dad and mom had made it very clear that they wanted her to stop seeing “that Dalton boy.” Amy defied them. She stood right up to them and said she would see him anyway, that he was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

They must have realized she meant what she’d said, because they’d backed off.

And after that, she and Derek spent every spare moment together. That New Year’s Eve, when he’d said he loved her, she’d believed him and declared her love right back. He promised there would never be anyone but her. Amy wanted him so much and he wanted her and, well, it was young love.

She couldn’t wait to have it all—all the kisses, the caresses, the soft, secret sighs. Making love was bound to happen.

And it did. In the early spring.

It was scary, that first time. Scary and a little awkward. But, oh so beautiful.

Already set to go to the University of Colorado on a full scholarship in the fall, Amy turned eighteen in May. In early June, she and Derek both graduated from Rust Creek Falls High.

“Remember graduation?” she asked, lost in the past now.

He made a low noise in the affirmative. “I remember your speech as valedictorian. ‘We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to do the best that we can every day, as we go forward into a future full of promise and the challenge of—’”

“Please.” She cut him off with a groan. “No more. There is no way I was ever that young.”

“Yeah, you were.” He reached up, brushed a rough-tender finger along her cheek, leaving a sweet trail of lingering sensation in his wake. “So was I. We were that young. And you were all set, with a big future ahead of you. I never wanted to hold you back.”

“I know that.”

“We were too young.”

She bit her lip, knowing he was right. She’d wanted to go to CU, wanted a good job that challenged her, and she’d doubted she would find that job in their tiny Montana town. At the same time, she hadn’t known how she would live without the boy she loved.

He said, “Think about it this way. It all ended up according to plan.”

“Right. Just with that big, painful detour stuck in the middle of it.”

Because by the end of June, her period was late. She’d waited a week and it didn’t come. She went to Derek. He drove her to Kalispell to buy a test and they rented a cheap room where she took that test.

She shivered a little and wrapped her sweater closer around her. “I was so scared when the test came out positive. And you took a knee right there in that motel room.”

“I wanted to marry you, Amy. I really did.”

She stared down at him, saw the moon reflected in his eyes. “I know. And I loved you. So much.”

“It was the Fourth of July. There were fireworks going off all night long, remember?”

Oh, yes, she did. “I remember.”

The next day, the fifth of July, they went to the courthouse and said I do, just the two of them, two scared kids with a baby on the way.

And for their honeymoon, they returned to the cheap room with its lumpy bed. At night, she could hear the trucks whizzing by on the highway.

“You were sorry, though, weren’t you?” he asked. “Sorry from the first.”

“It was only that I—”

“Don’t lie,” he said gently. “Let’s just tell each other the truth now, okay, and be done with it?”

“Yeah. All right.” She admitted, “I, well, I had serious second thoughts.”

“I knew it.” At least he didn’t sound angry.

But why should he? It was so long ago. And this wasn’t any big confession. This was making peace. With the past.

With each other.

This was putting it behind them, once and for all.

She said, “I just had trouble coping, you know? With my whole life turned around and a baby on the way.” She really had loved him. But it had all just seemed so overwhelming.

The next day and the day after that, he drove back to the Circle D to work. She stayed in Kalispell. She had a cell phone, though reception in the area was hit and miss back then. Her parents kept calling her. She let the calls go to voice mail for three days and then she finally answered and told them she had married Derek. Her dad demanded to know where she was. She hung up on him.

“And then, the night of the fourth day,” she said in a raggedy whisper, “my period came.”

Had she lost the baby? Or had she never been pregnant in the first place? Who knew?

“That hurt,” he said. “I mean, the baby had turned everything upside down. But suddenly, there was no baby and somehow, that was even worse.”

She agreed with a slow nod.

The next day—the fifth and final day—to cheer her up, he’d taken her to visit the Armstrongs while he went to work at the ranch.

Nobody knew that she’d married him—except the two of them and her parents. She’d made him promise not to tell his family until she was ready. When his mom and dad asked questions about where he got off to every night, he just said he was fine and for them not to worry. His parents had let it go at that. After all, he was nineteen, old enough to stay out all night if he wanted to. And besides, their ill-fated elopement didn’t last long. Before Rita and Charles Dalton got around to insisting that Derek tell them what was going on, it was over.

That day, the fifth day, when he dropped her off at the Armstrongs’, she had longed to confide in her friends—maybe not Eva, who was only thirteen at the time. But Delphine and Calla, definitely. They were like sisters to her.

She just couldn’t do it, though, couldn’t tell them what she was going through. They knew she was really upset about something and they hugged her and fussed over her. They told her that, whatever it was, it would be all right, that they would always be there for her, no matter what.

She asked Derek, “Did I tell you that Delphine quizzed me about you that day? She wanted to know if something had gone wrong between the two of us.” Everyone knew she’d been dating Derek, and the Armstrongs had seen him drop her off that morning.

“No, you never told me that. You hardly said a word on the drive back to the motel in Kalispell.”

“I was all turned around inside, so sad about losing the baby, wondering how it was all going to work out.”

“I remember.” His voice was flat. Bleak. And then he asked, “What did you say to her that day—to Delphine?”

“I just shook my head and promised that I was fine and so were you.”

“But she guessed you were lying.”

“Yeah. I’ll bet they all three did.”

“Even Eva? She was so young.”

“But she’s always been sensitive to what other people are going through.”

“That day,” he said, staring up at the dark sky, “was the end of it...”

The end of us, she thought. “After that day, I never saw you again until last Monday, right here at the farm.”

“Thirteen years,” he said, his voice so heavy. With regret? With sadness or maybe bitterness? She couldn’t have said and she didn’t quite have the nerve to ask him what exactly he was feeling right now.

Instead, she got on with it. “I have no idea how my dad knew to find us at that motel. I never told him where I was. I assumed he’d somehow followed us from the Armstrongs’ house. I asked Eva’s mom later, before I left for Boulder, if she had called my dad and told him I was there that day. She swore she hadn’t.” Derek said nothing. He stared at the sky. Somewhere nearby, a lone owl hooted. A shiver ran through her. She peered down at him more closely. “What?”

He shifted his gaze to meet hers. “I didn’t say anything.”

“I thought maybe you were about to.”

“Uh-uh.”

She drew in a slow breath. “Well, however he did it, my father figured it out.”

* * *

Derek stared up into her night-shadowed eyes. Her skin was so smooth, silvered in moonlight.

He knew how her father had found them. But he wasn’t going to tell her. What good would that do? Jack Wainwright wasn’t a bad man. He’d just wanted the best for his only child and he’d followed them from the Armstrongs’, followed them to Kalispell and that cheap motel.

At the sight of her dad emerging from his fancy pickup, looking grim and exhausted, Amy had started to cry.

Derek had hated himself then, for jumping the gun and begging her to marry him, for putting her in this position, for messing everything up.

He didn’t know what to do next. Amy had gotten pregnant—or maybe not. She’d lost the baby—or maybe not. Because how can you lose something that never was?

He’d known she was miserable that day, known she regretted running away with him. She’d had such big plans for herself and there she was, a not-pregnant married woman who wasn’t going to go to college, after all.

As he’d watched the tears tracking down her cheeks that July afternoon, Derek felt his heart shatter into a million pieces. He and Jack Wainwright agreed on one thing, at least: that run-down motel wasn’t good enough for Amy.

And what did Derek think he was going to do next? Move his bride into the bunkhouse with him at the Circle D? Or into the main house where his parents lived? Damn, but the truth he faced then was the hardest one of all.

He’d yet to get a real start in life and would need to depend on his family to help support her. And she? Amy deserved the best. With the baby gone, well, why shouldn’t she have the future she’d always planned on? His pride had felt frayed raw at all he couldn’t give her.